In the past few months I've started to balance my gaming life between making gold and raiding. Making gold has not always been the forefront of playing World of Warcraft. Originally I was raiding with a enjoyable fun group of friends. Ultimately as with many guilds we ended up breaking up due to players leaving the game and finding 'real' lives.

Later on I started to drag my way through the trenches in making every mistake in the book in making gold. As I was doing this I started to drift away from raiding. To keep the story short something happened with the guild I was at that point and I completely left raiding and focused on playing solo toons (and the occasional groups) and making my own fortune.

With the introduction of a much stronger Looking for raid and flex raiding I was able to step up my raiding schedule without interference with my gold making duties. Spending an hour a day making gold through the different means we've talked about allowed me to step back into the boss arena and take my swings.

I did find one thing that made it more difficult to pick up groups was that I live on a medium population server and there wasn't a lot of cross realm conversations. LFR would let me pick up one raid a week where I could loot for each boss. This was nice but by the end of the week I had run all three of my raiding toons through everything and I was back to bumbling my way around Timeless Isle looting and pillaging those poor mobs.

Then a friend made a mention of a very interesting tool. Someone had taken a PVP pre-made add-on named Oqueue and converted it allowing cross realm groupings for raids. The core functionality of the PVP side is still there and very strong. But with the addition of cross grouping for all types of raids it opened up a very interesting and enjoyable side.

It's very simple once it's set up. When you first add the package into your addon folder and start up the Wow engine you see what looks like two eyes on your mini map. Clicking that and your assaulted by a varied amount of data. You see a list of everyone that is using the new Oqueue channel that's in the background and just how many raids are there. At the bottom of the window the first button I clicked was one that said 'qualified'. This limits what you to see based on your gear you are wearing.

There are a lot of settings that are available but the basic strategy is that you see one of the raids or premades that your interested in. It sends a cross realm friend request to whoever is hosting the group and they decide if your added or not. There is also a wait list function that is built in so that if the premade is full your set into a queue (get it, the name and queue ha ha) and if someone drops then the next one up is added. You do have to queue and stay in the spec that you want to raid in. So tanking spec gets picked up as tanks and heals/dps the same.

One of the things I did notice is that when I was helping with a four celestial kill that if I flipped between windows reading something that it would fade me between realms. This became a problem because I had joined a premade on a pvp realm and ended up fading cross realm into about 20 flagged allies. After my death run back I didn't flip between my windows til after the raid was finished.

The forums at http://oqueue.forumotion.com give a lot of tips and tricks on how to get the most out of this addon.

Hopefully see you in the next flex raid. I will be the one pew pewing from the corner.